No, they couldn't. And neither could most adults, for that matter.
Innate ability is real.
Isn't that a bit too certain for something that's not settled at all? How else would you explain the Polgar sisters? I'm sure there are other examples, but this is the most famous one.
> How else would you explain the Polgar sisters?
Genetics is the obvious explanation. The father was clearly very intelligent.
Also to clarify: I agree that training and effort can have large effects, and that focusing on them is a good strategy. Over-believing in them is probably a good bias, even. But the idea that everyone is more or less the same except for effort is ridiculous.
Also I didn’t say innate ability doesn’t exist. But in my opinion is a small multiplier on top of effort. That’s why I said close to.
And this was still people selected from the small subset of the population choosing an engineering major. Human are much, much more different than you seem to think
Would you ever be tempted to make such a claim (that everyone is close to the same in ability and effort is the main determiner of success) about athletes? It's so obviously untrue that it's laughable. Why would you think that mental ability is magically distributed evenly?
Well yes, absolutely. People don’t do quadruple axels on the ice because they were somehow born with the ability, they can do it because they practice figure skating every day for years. Innate ability (or in this case, let’s be honest, mostly genetics determining body shape) certainly makes the difference between becoming an Olympic gold medalist and just being very good at the sport, but you need to get very far in the field before it truly holds you back.
I don’t have a lot of experience with high-level professional sports, but I’m a classically trained violinist, and I’ve seen first-hand how a lot of the abilities that many people chalk up to “talent” (sense of rhythm, perfect pitch, composing music) are just skills that can be learned. Some students might need to practice more than others, sure, and some might reach a higher ceiling, but I firmly believe anyone can reach a high level with applied effort.
“I don’t have the talent to paint so I won’t learn to do it” is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You've changed my claim. My claim isn't that world-class athletes, or even good athletes, don't have to work hard because of their talent to achieve elite levels. It's merely that talent is a huge determiner in success. It's also a huge determiner in how effective training is. An hour of training might improve a talented person 5 or 10x more than an hour of training would improve someone else.
This is all blindingly obvious if you've seen a sample of kids growing up. I remember the sister of one of my daughters friends, at age 3, was easily out-performing her brother and my daughter, who were a couple years older. This little 3 year could fearlessly climb up jungle gyms with ease, and kick around a ball, and swim fast. She hadn't practiced more. She could just do it.
OTOH maybe there is no posibility whatsoever that genetics can determine mind shape no matter what.
It's hard to say whether the motivation came from the good skills (understanding, memory) e.g. "I'm good at this, I like it!", or that the good skills came from the motivation. I believe both are important though, and that they are intertwined.
As someone wrote here innate ability is a real thing
There’s plenty of mediocre musicians who became world-famous, and plenty of great musicians who nobody’s heard about. Skill and success are pretty weakly correlated.
This is a fun and complicated topic. Yes, sometimes things outside of the music influence our perceptions of the music. If the Red Hot Chili Peppers were a bunch of bald fat dudes maybe they would have had less fans; if Kurt Cobain hadn't killed himself he would still be a legend but perhaps in the calbire of Eddie Vedder and not what he became. But the following underlying principal I believe to be true : it's impossible to survive the test of time in music without producing "good" music. Example of music that survived the test of time : The Beatles, Queen, Pink Floyd and I'd argue Nirvana, Pearl Jam etc. How do I define "survive the test of time" is another discussion I'd rather not get into lol.
Any child who read maths textbooks with enthusiasm for 3-4 hours a day for years could in theory at least get close to doing what he did, but what kid had that level of motivation?
Relayed by Nick Metropolis: Fermi and von Neumann overlapped. They collaborated on problems of Taylor instabilities and they wrote a report. When Fermi went back to Chicago after that work he called in his very close collaborator, namely Herbert Anderson, a young Ph.D. student at Columbia, a collaboration that began from Fermi's very first days at Columbia and lasted up until the very last moment. Herb was an experimental physicist. (If you want to know about Fermi in great detail, you would do well to interview Herbert Anderson.) But, at any rate, when Fermi got back he called in Herb Anderson to his office and he said, "You know, Herb, how much faster I am in thinking than you are. That is how much faster von Neumann is compared to me." [0]
I think that is the main obstacle to most people doing highly effective work and putting in long hours. You hear some call people who don't 'work hard' lazy, but my impression is that it's emotional capacity, and a lot of that comes from family.
I wonder if there is a correlation between prodigies and emotionally stable, healthy, present parents. It's hard to imagine children under a lot of stress - e.g., from abusive parents, highly unreliable parents (e.g., overwhelmed by addictions to drugs), emotionally unstable parents (e.g., narcissists), highly neglectful parents (e.g., who abandon their kids) ... - it's hard to imagine those kids doing what Tao did, regardless of their talent.
If my GP comment is true to some significant degree, it matters for people who are prodigies. It matters for the world, which benefits from the prodigies.
But I don't want to underemphasize the first or overemphasize the second. These are human beings, which is the overwhelming issue. They have the same needs and same importance as everyone else. That means we don't want to disregard their needs either because they are unusual and therefore more expensive to nurture, or because the world benefits from them and and doesn't care about their individual needs or thinks their needs can be sacrificed.
And on a similar basis, it has strong implications for all the other kids in the world, who need stable, loving, nurturing family.